“It is hardly necessary now to argue that the theological tenor of the English Church in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was firmly Protestant, even Calvinist, though literary critics have been in some danger of forgetting that fact as they stress Roman Catholic influences upon Donne or the medieval literary heritage of Herbert, …
Picking Up the Tab
“The aim of untold millions is to be free to do exactly as they choose and for someone else to pay when things go wrong” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. 5).
Easily Led in One Direction Only
“When a man tells me, in explanation of his anti-social behavior, that he is easily led, I ask him whether he was ever easily led to study mathematics or the subjunctives of French verbs” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. ix).
Just Like Alice’s Restaurant
“We build temples to the gods of commerce, and this is why the modern church looks like a shopping mall, sprawling and flat, plenty of parking, Visa and MasterCard accepted. In one city, a church mailed out hundreds of thousands of brochures hawking their wares. Come to our church, they said, and we’ll give you …
Cultural Inferiority
“Genetic or racial determinism is no better. It will come as a surprise to American readers, perhaps, to learn that the majority of the British underclass is white, and that it demonstrates all the same social pathology as the black underclass in America—for very similar reasons, of course” (Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom, p. …
Multi-Culti Vengeance
“[A]nd when he repeatedly exposed the follies of these policies in print, the advocates of ‘diversity’—who maintain that all cultures are equal but that opinions other than their own are forbidden—mounted a vicious and vituperative campaign against him . . . Hell, it seems, hath no fury like a multi-culturalist contradicted” (Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, …
Aesthetic Exemplar
“We should, however, approach Augustinian aesthetics not in medieval but in Reformation terms, taking account of the important new factor introduced by the Reformation — an overwhelming emphasis on the written word as the embodiment of divine truth. In this milieu the Christian poet is led to relate his work not to ineffable and intuited …
Spasms of Self-Righteousness
“There is nothing so absurd, wrote Macaulay in the middle of the nineteenth century, as the spectacle of the British public in one of its periodic fits of morality; but now the spectacle is sinister as well as absurd. To make up for its lack of a moral compass, the British public is prey to …
Away or To?
“Our ability to drive an hour to get to church has more often than not created distance from our next door neighbors, and it has done this without really creating closeness to those we worship with when we are done with our drive. For various reasons, we do more driving away than driving to” (Mother …
Deep Roots
“My contention [is] that the poetics of much seventeenth-century religious lyric derives primarily from Protestant assumptions about the poetry of the Bible and the nature of the spiritual life” (Lewalski, Protestant Poetics, p. 5)